“Credit control” may involve mechanisms that interact in real-time with accounts associated with end users, and controls or monitors the charges related to service usage associated with those end users' accounts. For example, credit control may involve checking whether credit is available for a given account, credit-reservation, deduction of credit from the end user account when service is completed and/or refunding of reserved credit that is not used. Credit control has particular applicability in the provision of network services, such as, for example, provision of cellular “airtime” in a cellular radio network, provision of multimedia data in a wired or wireless network, etc. Credit control may be implemented by a charging system that monitors and controls charges related to service usage of end users and grants and or denies credit authorizations to those end users, thus, enabling network service delivery to the end users.
One of the shortcomings of previous charging systems is their lack of support for the real time correlation of parallel charging events.
One problem that typically can occur happens when an operator is awarding bonuses to a service based on usage of another. If the awarded bonus is given for a service currently in use, there is a race towards the charging system and there can be no guarantee that the bonus is awarded before the usage of the service or vice versa. One example of this problem is when the Gateway General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) Support Node (GGSN) of a WCDMA/GSM system is used to accumulate usage of a data bearer and awarding bonuses to another service being carried by this data bearer; e.g. a free MMS for every downloaded megabyte.